With 1 Million Solar Projects Across America, SunShot Shines On

May 3, 2016

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SunShot funding helped 2,700 Hawaiian homes and businesses go solar. Using advanced inverters and systems integration research, the company was able to clear a massive backlog of projects that were installed but weren’t yet connected to the grid. Thanks to SunShot, thousands of projects flipped the switch, while maintaining the safety and reliability of the electric grid.

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This 2-megawatt solar array at the CoServ Solar Station in Krugerville, Texas, is part of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) SunShot project that is helping electric co-ops in rural areas of the country generate electricity through solar. By creating ready-to-use materials for co-ops that want to go solar, NRECA and SunShot will help even more Americans transition to cleaner energy sources.

Photo courtesy of CoServ

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This rooftop solar array in Connecticut was built thanks to a Solarize campaign, which helps to make solar energy more affordable by aggregating customer demand to lower prices. Research funded by SunShot helped to understand and improve this model.

Photo courtesy of Solarize Connecticut

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The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, located in Nevada and developed by SolarReserve, is the first utility-scale facility in the world to use advanced molten salt receiver technology. With help from SunShot funding, the company is developing the next generation of its solar receiver. The 110-megawatt power plant can power 75,000 homes, day or night, because it also incorporates energy storage.

Photo courtesy of SolarReserve

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This 4.6-kilowatt system in Cleveland, Ohio, belongs to an employee of Cisco Systems, which offered solar as a part of an employee benefit program developed by SunShot awardee Geostellar. Geostellar’s online solar marketplace technology—developed with support from a SunShot Incubator award—reduces the non-hardware soft costs associated with going solar, saving consumers money.

Photo courtesy of Geostellar

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SunShot funds five Regional Test Centers, each of which represents a range of weather and sunlight conditions so that researchers can study how different types of solar panels are able to withstand the elements and provide reliable electricity. This test site in Cocoa, Florida, is able to host up to 250 kilowatts of solar. Data collected here has helped companies refine their products to achieve the best possible performance for solar consumers.

Photo courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories

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This 50-kilowatt system at GE in Schenectady, New York, uses crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules that feature wafers made with 1366 Technologies’ Direct Wafer™ process. SunShot has supported 1366 Technologies since 2008 to develop its process, which uses molten materials to develop solar cells in the lab.

Photo courtesy of 1366 Technologies

The solar industry recently passed a major milestone: the 1 millionth solar energy system was installed at a home or business in the United States. There were just 150,000 systems generating solar power when the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative was launched in 2011, which means that if just two of your neighbors went solar five years ago, 14 have since followed suit. Industry analysts expect the next million will be added in just two years. As more and more people across the country choose to go solar, the industry also spurs job growth, economic activity, tax revenue and cleaner air for all Americans.

As part of the industry-wide Million Solar Strong campaign, we’re taking a moment to celebrate this milestone and reflect back on some of the ways SunShot has contributed to the solar industry’s spectacular growth. The SunShot Initiative was founded by the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office to focus on one goal—to drive down the cost of solar. Halfway into the mission, we’re 70% of the way to our goal of achieving $0.06 per kilowatt-hour.

Costs have plummeted while adoption has accelerated, and SunShot has led the way in addressing key roadblocks that could have stalled the solar industry. SunShot has spurred the development of the world’s most efficient photovoltaic and concentrating solar power technologies. Since 2011, eight SunShot partners have set more than 15 world records for solar cell efficiency. Energy Department investments are helping to drastically drive up solar efficiency and performance and contributing to a continuous drop in the cost of solar. Solar panels today cost about 1% of what they did 40 years ago.

While continuing to pursue research that cuts the hardware costs of photovoltaic and concentrating solar power technologies, our soft costs, system integration and technology to market teams have been making inroads in the broader solar landscape. Since 2011, projects supported by SunShot have won nine R&D 100 awards, a prestigious honor that annually recognizes the 100 most outstanding technology developments with promising commercial potential. SunShot’s trademark Incubator program has further demonstrated the power of government and industry partnerships—for every $1 in government investment into small solar businesses through Incubator, those companies have turned around and earned more than $22 in private follow-on funding.

With targeted support from the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative, the solar industry is making major cost reductions, enabling technology innovation and market growth, and making significant progress toward cost-competitive solar by the end of the decade. Explore some of the projects we’ve enabled in our slideshow above and on our project map.

Of course, we’re not stopping at 1 million. The solar industry faces even more challenges as solar comprises more and more of the grid’s energy supply. In order to continue growing rapidly, the soft costs of solar—from financing to interconnection—need to drop further. In addition, grid operators need to be able to better manage variable distributed energy loads. These are just some of the challenges the SunShot team prepares for while expecting a not-too-distant future with several million solar installations. In the coming weeks, we will be announcing our ambitious plans for how we’re going to get there. Sign up to find out first what’s next for SunShot.

SunShot Fast Facts

There were just 150,000 systems generating solar power in the United States when the SunShot Initiative was launched in 2011.

Just five years later, there are now 1 million solar systems installed at a home or business in the United States.

Halfway into its mission, SunShot is 70% of the way to its goal of achieving $0.06 per kilowatt-hour.

Dr. Lidija Sekaric was the director of the Solar Energy Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, where she helped manage and balance the portfolio of research, development, demonstration, and deployment programs in achieving our national SunShot goals.